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IBM's Mainframe Dinosaur Turns 40
theodp writes "According to an SFGate.com article, PCs were supposed to kill off the mainframe, but Big Blue's big boxes are still crunching numbers, posting sales of $4.2 billion in 2003. First unveiled on April 7, 1964, the IBM mainframe computer celebrates its 40th birthday this week with a sold-out party at the Computer History Museum." The SFGate article also reveals: "Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
Skynet wont be able to take over with just a bunch o' desktops...
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
PCs were supposed to kill off the mainframe, but Big Blue's big boxes are still crunching numbers, posting sales of $4.2 billion in 2003.
Well, there is a reason you still see COBOL jobs being posted from time to time. The IBM mainframe architecture was well designed and well implemented and to quote an oft used phrase: "if it aint broke, don't fix it".
Of course they have made some improvements over the years, but these things are going to have a mighty impressive return on investment over the course of their lifetimes. Much more so than your average desktop PC which (if your running Windows) needs (is required) to be replaced every couple of years or so.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...and they tend to deal with tape media a whole lot better/faster too
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Thank god IBM's management are less susceptible to the '70% of statistics are made up on the spot' rule that other managers aren't....
Yes. Yes it does.
Mainframes are usually more robust, have a more developed architectures and in general are designed around a more stringent set of standards. Most mainframes have 24/7 use in mind. A friend of mine at NORAD talked about a PDP-11 with a 6 year uptime. Granted a PDP isn't a mainframe but those machines are architected with longevity in mind
Thalasar
While the overall structure of mainframes (OS, programming languages, etc.) have not changed much over the last 40 years, the actual guts of these computers have actually improved with the times (disk, computing capacity, etc.). Mainframes are much more suited for data warehouse and batch process applications then today's more "sexy" multi-tier architectures. The only downside to mainframe computing would be cost.
I personally don't think mainframes will be gone... ever.
COBOL is still in wide use. It is even being used with .NET, just to give you some idea of how widespread it is.
libertarianswag.com
That's because you are the one that is wrong. Any and every dictionary I've ever seen has data as the plural of datum. Maybe no one is paying attention to you because they're tired of explaining it to YOU.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Uhhh I was taught in the 1980s that the archaic usage has changed.
One DATA several DATAS. The plural has been anglicised for a long time now
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Not only are they still around, the world is moving back towards a mainframe-ish approach.. Hell, a webserver is a mainframe-ish approach if you consider a browser a dumb terminal (which I do).
Mainframe + dumb terminals:
Code executes in one place (one machine to maintain from a software viewpoint). Code 'lives' with the data.
Collaboration/groupwork/etc is a no-brainer. "Brenda bring up invoice #43223 and blah blah blah".
Software is protected from users (for the most part).
PCs + Fat/thin Clients:
Code excutes all over. You wind up with versioning/dependency hell. It's a bitch to administrate. Just when you think everythings good, some jackass installs a swimming fish screensaver and you're back to level 0.
Data winds up in multiple, disjointed, locations. Bleh..
Where I work we installed, and still support (and will for a decade past the official HP EOL date) HP 9000 series mainframes. I mainly deal with moving that stuff to the PC world, and I can tell you, lifes a whole lot simpler when you dont have to worry about what version of the OS, etc, etc, etc is running on the client machines..
We're looking hard at Windows Terminal Services - essentially a modern day mainframe implementation, complete with GUI. Or we could go multiple X sessions, but our customers aren't to thrilled with the idea of *nix..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
MOD PARENT UP
well said
Data is the singular. DATUM IS THE PLURAL
:)
Merriam-Webster begs to differ: Etymology: Latin, plural of datum
Although I don't think I've heard many people ever talk about datum either... maybe because it's always always plural. When was the last time you had only one piece of datum?
Place sig here.
Yay! *Pops corks*
Maybe you should have looked it up at some point over the last few decades. Here is an extract from Wikipedia:
A datum is a statement accepted at face value. Data is the plural of datum. A large class of practically important statements are measurements or observations of a variable. Such statements may comprise numbers, words, or images.
The word data is the plural of Latin datum, neuter past participle of dare, "to give", hence "something given". The past participle of "to give" has been used for millennia, in the sense of a statement accepted at face value; one of the works of Euclid, circa 300 BC, was the Dedomena (in Latin, Data). In discussions of problems in geometry, mathematics, engineering, and so on, the terms givens and data are used interchangeably. Such usage is the origin of data as a concept in computer science: data are numbers, words, images, etc., accepted as they stand.
Bah!
Is it just me or is that a bit of a biased quote? Its kind of like Steve Jobs saying that "Apples are the fastest computer on the face of the planet", or Bill Gates saying that "Windows is the most secure OS in the world". These statements may or may not be true. Studies may be done to determine the validity of the claims, but I would argue that ultimately most of the world's data is tied up in Girls Gone Wild DVD's. The point is that the makers of the claims have a bit of a personal stake in the claim, making them slightly more apt to being taken with the obligatory salty grain.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The other 30% is porn and cookies.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Should've used the preview... That last part should have read:
...
maybe because it's almost always plural
Place sig here.
At my first startup, one of my first multipeople multiyear Java projects was a mainframe screen scraper ( TN3270 using AWT - example ). I was fresh out of college & totally unaware that mainframes still ruled the planet. Those two years & the huge revenues it brought led the startup to be acquired and made a lot of people really rich ( minus moi, ofcourse :(
Lots of money to be made in desktop-mainframe connectivity.
This claims that as of the end of 2002, 15% of the mainframes IBM was selling would be running Linux.
Has that number dropped off?
Mainframes and Minis will be around a long time. To get PC based systems up to their level of reliability, ease of use, and maintainability would turn the PC based system into a MINI.
I have 75 iSeries (As/400) that I oversee. You want to know how much time I spend per week checking up on them? Only an hour or so. I receive reports from the machines when they have problems. If one has a fault it is usually hardware and rarely does the downtime pass a few hours.
Meanwhile the network group (read : uses PC based technologies) is always fixing something and has 5 people dedicated to it compared to two for the iSeries boxes. That doesn't count the PC-support group which supports desktops...
We have 3 mainframes as well, some of the code from these machines has been in use since the early 70s. Some of the code migrated to the iSeries with little but header changes.
But the best, the iSeries has been on 64-bit PowerPCs natively for 10+ years. Didn't have to recompile or change 99% of our code to do it. How long has the PC base world been struggling to get there?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I guess this depends on how you define "data". The Economist recently described a Berkeley report that 3.5 to 5.5 *Exabytes* of data were produced in 2002. If you believe the unlikely proposition that Blue Glue is holding 70% of that new data, then you have to wonder why IBM only made $4.2B in selling mainframes to store and process that data.
mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.
- The Devil's IT Dictionary
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I used to hate the SPF/PDF interface, but after a decade of being forced to use (by employer) with the utter shit that is MS Windows, it's now just fond memories of something that WORKED. also, REXX did (and still does) rock.
and long after no one cares who billgates was, there will still be Big Blue Iron.
oh yeah, BSD Lives!
Can anyone explain the difference between a mainframe and a supercomputer?
The only single datum I use is the geographic references for, say, sea level. By definition, if everyone agrees on one sea level, or baseline, or whatever, it's a datum.
See This article for more.
I told them that with two weeks and a good book, I could be as fluent in COBOL as any of their engineers, but that wasn't good enough. I decided right then I didn't want to work for anyone as rigid as that. I don't know how they did in the boom, but I rememember hearing about them bleeding red ink just a couple of years later. And they don't appear to be on the Nasdaq anymore...
The CB App. What's your 20?
"..noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
They obviously haven't seen my pron collection!
I can only imagine the future... .. when the power of the mainframes today could be contained within small boxes under your desk!
Ohh, wait..
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The most widely used flying command and control platform is the AWACS designed by IBM and Boeing back in the 70s. The USAF,NATO,JDF, and saudi's are all based on the same dual IBM 360 platform (named 4-pi). These mainframes all have been upgraded in memory and converted from tape drives to hard drives. We still develope the software in JOVIAL and assembler.Info
Science is the Real TRUTH!
4.2 billion dollars? Did they only sell 6 last year? ;)
HitScan
The IBM mainframe computer celebrates its 40th birthday this week with a sold-out party at the Computer History Museum
Yeah, I'll bet that's going to be a real barn burner
... Thats umpossible!
This is the 40th anniversary of a mainframe: the System 360. The 360 was a darned important machine (amongst other things, it was the first computer with a byte-addressible memory), but it was hardly the very first mainframe. True computers had been around for about 25 years -- and technically speaking, all computers were mainframes before integrated circuitry made minicomputers and microcomputer feasible.
I saw my first computer in 1966 - a IBM 360/44 ( a mod 40 without MVCL instruction). FORTRAN was the language of choice. I knew where my career was headed. Here I am almost 40 years later.
Tired of computing and hoping for a less-stressful retirement.
In Woodland Hills, CA, there is a mainframe that contains all the medical records of every event that has ever taken place in the state. (I used to work IT there, and I've seen it...farkin' impressive piece of machinery.)
They TRIED to convert it to a more conventional system, but they couldn't, due to the fact that no database on earth could handle the sheer number of records.
Impressive, no?
COBOL isn't dead?
Take a good look at the SunRay terminals that Sun is offering. Rather than hack and patch Windows, they simply made a few modifications to X, most of the client-server tech was already in place.
Thin Client Windows has been a nightmare, and it's only getting worse. One of the original incarnations, WinDD hosted by a Tektronix-modified version of Windows NT 3.5, wasn't so bad... Windows was simpler back then. But all of the "ease of use" and "zero administration" crap Microsoft and Citrix have built up since then has made thin client Windows a miserable beast to deal with. I know many administrators who swear a building full of plain PCs and a good Norton Ghost setup is easier to maintain.
four.. Three to hold it down and one to rip it's header off.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Why PCs Crash, and Mainframes Don't
Best Slashdot Co
I clicked submit too early... I should also point out that one potential solution may be to buy "thin" x86 workstations, just a cheap PC with lots of RAM, no drives, and a simple BIOS that supports netbooting. It's *nix, I know, but a netboot X terminal may be the way to go. Some scripts could be written to allow for local storage for those that need it. (Sun is doing the same thing with the SunRay, they have a USB storage patch now).
...Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of System/360s!!!!
The "problem" with mainframes is not so much that they are old, but that most of the applications didn't use relational databases. If the applications used relational databases, then one could much more easily slowly replace COBOL applications with a more pleasant language of implementation in piecemeal.
Mainframes are Turing Complete, so that any software can be made to run on them if the tools are built. Thus, things like limited-length file names can be transitioned to longer names in a way similar to how Windows allowed one to move to long file names. A mainframe could make an ideal web server because of its security and multi-processing capabilities. If this is the case, then why is it not done often?
Companies seem to have trouble doing this because of data sharing issues. They must keep using the old data while the conversion takes place to newer conventions. But this would mean having Java and PHP apps accessing data stored in the likes of IMS (navigational) databases. But this would mean one had to keep using IMS even after the conversion. (There are IMS-to-relational translation techniques, but they are hokey for the most part and it is tough to get decent normalization because of the different philosophies.)
Thus, the "problem" with mainframes is not the hardware, but the database conversion. The live data cannot easily be in two kinds of databases at once.
Table-ized A.I.
From an article on the same page, apparently
bananas haven't had sex in 10,000 years and
are dangerously monocultured as a result.
hrm that doesnt sound right when I'm sure its forum multiple and fora singular for example.
S/390 and zSeries do. I somehow doubt that Linux could be ported to S/360
AS400 .NE. mainframe. System 390 .EQ. mainframe.
He never said AS/400 ws a mainframe. He talked about both mainframes and minicomputers. In fact, if you look at his post again, he said his business has 75 AS/400s and 3 mainframes.
And for those that don't already know this: even a big Unix server is still a Microcomputer. Takes more fault tolerance and funky system architecture than what a Sun has to be called a Mini.
Which brings up the question: is an HP/Tandam NonStop Himalaya a mini or a mainframe?
In English it's neither plural nor singular. Data is a mass noun - like "water" or "air" - you don't count how many of them you have without specifying a container or a measurement of some sort. Just like it is nonsense to say "I have 3 airs here", but you could say "I have 3 bottles of (or litres of, or cubic feet of, or kilograms of...) air here. It's nonsense to say "I have 3 data here." That doesn't mean anything. Now, "3 Bytes of (or pages of, or databases of, or integers of, or strings of, or columns of...) data, now that makes sense. The singular or plural designation goes on the measurement noun, not on the mass noun.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In addition to mainframes, there's also the minicomputer (sometimes called "midrange"). IBM's AS/400 iSeries is such a beast.
Minis don't typically have as many layers of fault tolerance or as much I/O as a mainframe of the same age, but they're close, and a mini is typically far more reliable (in both HW and SW) by design than a big iron unix server (think Sun).
$4.2 billion is what, three mainframes? Not impressed yet.
;-)
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
posting sales of $4.2 billion
So, IBM sold three mainframes. What's the big deal, here?
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
That is absolutely priceless! Where the heck can you be where people put up with being 'corrected' on that for years, without ever telling you the right answer? Brilliant.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Before the /360, IBM had the 1400 series (1401, 1410, 1440, 1460, 7010) that was byte addressable, the 702, 705 Models I, II and III and 7080 (one series) and the 1620 models I and II and 1710 (another series). These were all byte (or character if you want to claim bytes have to be 8 bits - which wasn't the standard until later) addressable: that was the common wisdom about how to do machines oriented toward commercial processing. Most of the other computer companies had byte addressable systems, too.
John Roth
You have the power of a minframe under your desk?
Riiiiight. How big is your desk?
(I especially like the Willow Rosenberg quote).
> even a big Unix server is still a Microcomputer
The historical platform for UNIX was the VAX, which everyone considered a Mini.
Also, since IBM largely uses the same hardware for RS/6000 and AS/400, I'd be curious why one is a Minicomputer and the other isn't
I guess I better pull out my book of FORTRAN for Dummies.
Wait. Any FORTRAN book is FORTRAN for dummies
~mingust
"Lots of money to be made in desktop-mainframe connectivity."
I'm waiting for when this trickles down to the consumer. Powerful computer in the basement (just another appliance), and something more than dumb terminals, but less than full blown PCs. All the heat and noise stays were it belongs. Peace and quiet were it belongs, and with gigabit networking, and wireless, along with smarter appliances, we get ever closer.
...have they bought asteroid insurance?
Gosh, you're dim.
Hmm, I don't think so. However IIRC the singular of sheep is shep and the singular of dice is die.
"God, yes. You hardly ever see [MRAM] anymore, and [Millipede] are being phased out right and left."
To allow IMS programs to run under Linux? I realize that isn't the whole problem-since it is VERY expensive to shut some of these systems down for _any_ period of time.
It just seems like there is $3billion in business up for grabs to whoever does the software first.
As a DBA and Linux/Windows user, I don't quite see what the capabilities are that are missing.
Certainly in relational databases you can restrict acess to a database or table to any set of users you want.
No, I'm talking there is no database program that could manage that many files.
Once they're gone, they'll be back. From personal experience, I've seen that centralized systems always work better than multiple PCs spread all over the place in terms of reliability. So, I don't think you'll see mainframes go away that quickly AND you'll eventually see them come back. There's just too many benefits, the main one being efficient use of power. I expect that what we'll wind up seeing in the future is a "centralized" system where the OS and the applications and the data are all one entity and the entire network is one big computer.
Think about it... Back when people used to actually, literally wire programs into old time computers... all that stuff still happens in that box on by your feet or on your desk. Thin abuout how many levels and how much duplication in task there is in a PC:
You have the microcode at the processor level which is really an analog to programs. But they aren't programs for you, the user. They are programs for the CPU's infrastructure. Then the RAM... It' all over the freakin' place. It's in the CPU, on the motherboard in various places, in your DIMMs, your video card, many periphs, etc... Then you've got the BIOS which is like higher level software compared to the microcode. It's a st of single purpose applications again. But not for you... it's for your hardware. And it interfaces with the OS at some point which (in many cases these days) takes over for the BIOS adding yet another layer of software.
This time, the software that the OS is, is partially for you and partially for your hardware. If you are strictly speaking kernel-wise, then it's pretty much a bridge between user space apps (shell) and the machine. Then you have your final layer of applications which ARE for you. But will it end there? No... you've got the network protocol stacks. This is the top layer of the multilayered cake that leads to the network.
But think about it. It's ALL THE SAME THING. Over and over again at different levels with slightly different purposes. So... at some point in time, all these PCs are going to be embedded devices, or wearables, or implants or entities providing even more layers. But when you peel the onion, you're still going to see THE SAME THINGS. Over and over and over again. And on top of all of that, you are going to see the shifts back and forth from centralized to de-centralized and back again. It's part of some cosmic imperative because if you think even eeper you see it mimicked in politics, communications technology (think old time TV vs. satellite vs. over the air digital vs. WLAN based PVRs), and even the automobile vs. mass transportation.
It's some kind of cosmic rhythm that pulses through the millennia like an ethereal rave...
Un-news
Someone with points to spare should mod up the parent post, since it is an important point an no one seems to have noticed it. Yes, this is the anniversary of the System/360 family of mainframes, which is a very significant anniversary for sure. But no, this is certainly not the 40th anniversary of the mainframe. The Univac I, II, III. The early Ferranti models. The IBM 700/7000 series. Lots more. Mainframes left and right, throughout the 1950s.
I know another museum that houses IBM machines: the U.S. Holocaust Museum. I think it's unfair that a giant corporation is allowed to profit from the money and the expertise they gained supporting the Nazi regime (as well as the Allied forces) in the 1940's. I know the IBM of today is far removed from the IBM of then, but it pains me that they have never been held responsible, even financially.
An interesting read: IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation
No, forum is singular, fora is plural. Both datum and forum are 2nd declension neuter in Latin, so -um is singular, and -a is plural.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
There are times when the word DATUMS is correct.
For example, when computing the center of gravity of an aircraft, all moments are measured relative to the datum, an arbitrarily chosen reference point along the longitudinal axis. That's pluralled (any noun can be verbed) as datums.
should read:
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Anyone who's familiar with mainframes and mainframe culture wouldn't doubt the statement is accurate, or very close. PC "culture" is about today, and mainframe culture is about forever. You can't begin to imagine how much data is being stored on and offline for mainframe use. It's mind-boggling.
That must mean that most of the worlds pr0n is stored on their mainframes...
The minis and PC type architecture is catching up to the mainframe in terms of performance and storage capacity but it still doesn't rival in terms of reliability and failover.
The big problem in converting those legacy applications is threefold. First, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. A lot of systems from charge card capture to reservations systems are efficiently powered by code that is decades old, in some cases going back thirty plus years.
Second, overwhelming bit of "business rules" have been embedded into the system. Programmers no longer work a long and prosperous career, much of the development and support work has been outsourced to India. Analysts and end users have moved on also, promoted to ranks in different disciplines or off to entirely different companies. When these systems were designed and built, the folks who participated in the build process were endeared to the company they worked for. And as time passed, and that model of work eroded, still, big cut and paste jobs were performed and the old code was "wrapped" into a new application. Many features of the product and services being supported exist hidden in the code, only beknownst to the customers affected. Traversing through the labrynth of hundreds of thousands of LOC can be a daunting task, especially when assigned to someone not familiar with the business or new to the profession.
Finally, the sheer bureaucracy that's in place with these applications makes change akin to moving solid mountains. Twelve panels and six VP signatures are required for simple program change. Seven committees, twelve VPs and over two dozen groups may have to get involved in any significant project that offers notable enhancemenets or a rewrite. Testing groups want millions of dollars budgeted to test the new application. Testing tools are sparse and/or non-existent. It's no wonder that many such grandiloquent undertakings are shelved, even after years of development.
AZspot
Byte addressing means that memory addresses are totally independent of word size. At the time, the main effect of byte addressing was to eliminate the long-standing distinction between "business" computers and "scientific" computers, which mainly had to do arithmetic precision. The long term effect was to make people think about data in more abstract ways. It was an important breakthrough.
DATA
data ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dt, dt, dat)
pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.
Computer Science. Numerical or other information represented in a form suitable for processing by computer.
Values derived from scientific experiments.
Plural of datum.
[Latin, pl. of datum. See datum.]
Usage Note: The word data is the plural of Latin datum, "something given," but it is not always treated as a plural noun in English. The plural usage is still common, as this headline from the New York Times attests: "Data Are Elusive on the Homeless." Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts and results, implies that data here is indeed singular.
Smaller, yes. But will they be more reliable?
You don't buy(or rent, as most seem to be) mainframes for their size characteristics....
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
That wasn't the point.
It was a joke. I simply said what people said about mainframes 20 years ago.
"You don't really need reliability when the machines are so cheap and small. Just string a few together!"
It's a vicious circle. The PC under my desk could very well be as/more powerful then some of the mainframes made in 1984. The PC under your desk in 10-15 years from now could very well be as fast as a mainframe made today.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Incorrect grammar is something up with which we should not put.
Webster's says that data is the plural form of the latin word datum.
This is from Webster's:
Main Entry: data
Pronunciation: 'dA-t&, 'da- also 'da-
Function: noun plural but singular or plural in construction
Usage: often attributive
Etymology: Latin, plural of datum
usage- Data leads a life of its own quite independent of datum, of which it was originally the plural. It occurs in two constructions: as a plural noun (like earnings), taking a plural verb and plural modifiers (as these, many, a few) but not cardinal numbers, and serving as a referent for plural pronouns (as they, them); and as an abstract mass noun (like information), taking a singular verb and singular modifiers (as this, much, little), and being referred to by a singular pronoun (it). Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it.
and this is from Dictonary.com
Usage Note: The word data is the plural of Latin datum, "something given," but it is not always treated as a plural noun in English. The plural usage is still common, as this headline from the New York Times attests: "Data Are Elusive on the Homeless." Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts and results, implies that data here is indeed singular.
I'm under 30, and I even have my own PDP-11/04. Still need to get it up and running, but it takes time to track down all the pieces I need.
;)
Then again, I just got my rackmount arcnet hub from ebay a few days back, so don't think me typical.
Anyone know where I can get my own s370? Mainframes are cool, and I shouldn't be deprived of one... (also interested in old CDC or Data General stuff).
Hypercorrection is actually a sign of illiteracy.
...". Editors won't let you do that these days, it has to be "The data indicate ... ".
Datum has always been singular. In my experience, 'datum' was used for something important. For instance, in surveying you would establish datum points to which all other measurements would be referenced.
Until recently, 'data' was plural but could be used as a collective noun. (An example of such a noun is 'herd' as in "The herd IS grazing.") This was good. If you are talking about data as a collection of statistical information, then one data point is meaningless. The data are only important as a collective. Using data as a singular to indicate a collection of information is meaningful and important. You used to be able to say: "The data indicates
So to the language Nazis, who insist on always treating 'data' as a plural, I say: Seig Heil you illiterate, innumerate (many expletives deleted)
Uhm, you are trying to correct the wrong part of the sentence. It should read:
"...70 percent of the world's data is still..."
The verb should agree with '70 percent' not 'data'. The group is being treated as a single whole, thus it should be 'is', not 'are'.
The financals mainframe (actually mainframes, there's two in synch in seperate buildings) are to the effect of 10 years old, never a downtime at all. Of course, this all comes at a price. The service contract itself is damn expensive and, of course, you can't just going and running whatever you want on it. All software must be extensively testes and verified, never mind that most apps just aren't available for it.
PCs are designed for a different task than larger computers.
-1, Wrong
I have been correcting people over this for decades and still nobody corrects their usage
Because they're too busy laughing?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
That depends on how you measure 'power' though.
Can you hook up 35 printers to your PC? How many terminals does it support? Can you keep four operators busy mounting tapes on the drives connected to it?
People have the notion that because they have a CPU that spins soooo fast that it has the thruput of a mainframe. Which is an error.
---
Mainframes are nice and all, but in aggregate communication and I/O bandwith any reasonable supercomputer will put them to shame.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No joke, I've worked at a company where there were blue-haired old ladies-- former janitors from 30 years ago-- who had established a power base surrounding the AS/400s and wouldn't let it go.
This is one reason why the company was still running Arcnet and GOD AWFUL TERMINAL SOFTWARE IN ALL CAPS in 2001.
This hardware company, 30 years ago, started out in a chicken coop-- and these old ladies had been there since the days of the chicken coop. This is all true and I am not making any of it up!!!
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
With the proper operating system, and a few add-on cards, a modern server PC could easily handle hundreds of serial printers (which I am assuming you mean. Parallel same difference.)
As far as tapes, well, you don't normally mount tapes like the old days with reel to reel spindles. Those things weren't nearly as fast as a modern DLT or AIT system. A modern server PC can easily handle a handful of drives operated with very large robotic library systems. You don't need "operaters" anymore, man.
I do believe that my desktop has more THROUGHput then a 1985 mainframe, by far.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
With regards to the printers: 128 at the moment via local connections (though 127 sharing 12Mbps of bandwidth, if you include networked postscript printers, effectively unlimited) Terminals: serial (atm, just 2, though I have a couple of multi-port pci serial cables), network(effectively unlimited, and already has netbooted machines (sparcs and x86)), console(could go two console), or combination? Given that it doesn't have tapes, no.
Computers today could do it. It's just a matter of having the extra parts to handle it. Of course most mainframes are going to beat the crap out of single channel scsi raid, 2 64-bit pci busses, etc for IO. Though compared to this thing's processors, the word creamed comes to mind for cpu-intensive tasks.
Not that I disagree about the fast cpu (which is likely unable to even pull the memory speeds reqired.) Comparitively, a RS/6000 (workstations & servers) from 1997 has 4 256-bit memory paths of PC50, which puts it at the equivelent of a PC200 DIMM, and if they interlaced the banks themselves (of which I am not sure, and doubt) it would be equivelent of a PC800 DIMM, only dual-channel DDR400 can match that, from a 7 year old machine.
Who modded the this "Troll"?
Its parent was clearly trying to start just the sort of non-sequiter argument over semantics that all you Cliff Clavens fell for.....
"Doug Balog, ... noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers. And Josselyn said they are bound to stay there for a long time.
...
The corporate world's bid to cut costs was what ultimately helped save the mainframe, he added."
Cutting costs is the marketing sprach they lay on us. The mainframers saved their mainframes, and their jobs, by hoarding that 70% of the data, accessible only within the mainframe, not import/exportable to potential successors. So they've stalled development of distributed computing at every turn, with tech barriers and FUD.
"IT networks based on servers and PCs required more staff and therefore was more expensive to operate than a centralized system, he said.
"You need to throw more people at the problem," he said.
From a pure computer hardware company, it morphed into an IT services giant selling software, hardware -- including PCs, servers and mainframes -- and, most important of all, helping companies set up and maintain their networks."
When they realized they had convinced business that more people were required to run networks, they got behind that, rather than improve the management efficiency of networks. Now they love Linux. Doesn't that mean that Linux is the best way for businesses to waste money on inefficient systems that will be kept alive on life support as long as it fills IBM's coffers, regardless of the alternatives?
--
make install -not war
Not so.
According to Strunk & White's Elements of Style 3rd. Revision, datum is the singular. This holds to convention: bacterium/bacteria, for example. Thus, one would not, strictly speaking, write "we collected this data," but rather, "we collected these data." Similarly, the data are collected, a datum is collected.
Now, a datum can be, in general, any single piece of information. I've actually seen a USGS Topographic Map titled a "datum."
I have discovered a truly marvelous
I did some work for a large payroll company, and this was the platform IBM sold them for running mission critical payroll processing for its thousands of customers.
This isn't about legacy application as much as it is about consolidating clustered applications into an easier to manage platform. Believe it or not, you can still do state-of-the-art software development despite the physical housing being a mainframe.
We did all the software development on the PC. The mainframe was simply the deployment destination. This is one advantage of the J2EE architecture. This also ruled out .NET, as Windows didn't offer the stability that Linux offered on the mainframe. However, we did happen to use Windows on the PCs in order to be able to use Rational Rose. Barring Rose, which isn't needed in deployment, our development architecture was completely compatible with Linux.
From a J2EE perspective, this eliminated the need to manage clusters in operation, as well as to develop for them. Clustering, despite its raves in the news, has a lot of production related issues that the mainframe solves. This is part of IBM's marketing pitch.
Open Standards Portal
People call mainframes "dinosaurs" because of their size, and presumably because they will be extinct soon. But remember, dinosaurs were around for over 100 million years, and the IBM mainframe has been around for only 40. So the IBM mainframe has only 99,999,960 years to go.
Scary.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Arexx (Amiga Rexx) was the best thing ever implemented on the Amiga, if you had two programs that did X and Y you "simply" merged them with an arexx script, and presto: an application to do X*Y.
There were even programs with arexx ports that let you create application GUI front ends to control your scripts.
I remember reading about mainframes going out the door, and after a certain point, and after my father retired, I started saying "his last job was to turn off the mainframes." He in turn, on hearing this story, would say, "that's just about right." But several years later, I discovered that mainframes and networked PCs co-existed in the same offices I worked in as a contractor. I was surprised to find these ancient beasts in place after place, But, they still do have their benefits. How much longer will they be useful?
This is the same machine that Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, predicted "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" in 1943.
The last time I got bit.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You are correct insofar the Latin roots of the word are concerned, and there used to be lots of people who were picky about getting the English usage of "data" correct with respect to the Latin rules. However, such pickyness is rare these days, and it's become common and acceptable to use "data" as a mass noun.
The word datum is mostly used in specialized fields, where it has in some cases acquired a more specific meaning, such as "a piece of data associated with a specific location".
My understanding of mainframes is that most existing customers are keeping (and maintaining) them. But I haven't heard of new companies deciding to go out and buy their first mainframe. Does anyone know otherwise?
CICS is a neat idea that deserves a new look. It's a "transaction processing OS". Think of it as an OS whose purpose in life is to run CGI programs efficiently. In its simplest form, each incoming transaction starts up a new program which reads the transaaction, connects to the database, processes the transaction, and exits, typically within a fraction of a second. The operating system is optimized for starting and running those transactions.
CGI processing under Linux is inefficient, and hacks like mod_perl are needed so that a new process isn't created for each transaction. One could do better. Transaction programs under CICS are started, run up to the point that they need input, and stopped. When a transaction comes in, a copy of the stopped transaction program is forked off, used to run the transaction, and terminated. So there's no way for data to leak between transactions. All transaction programs run in a jail, allowed to talk only to the database and to reply to their incoming message.
With better OS support for transactions, web servers could have a cleaner, faster interface for their transactions.
The Z-series will experience downtime if its power supply is cut and it doesn't have some form of backup power supply that can take over in a matter of nanoseconds. This can be anything from somebody unknowingly unplugging/disconnecting the thing all the way up to an EMP via a pinch or an exploding (thermo)nuclear device....
Of course, an EMP will ruin anything remotely electronic if it is not properly shielded from it....
interesting my ass.
parent is nothing more than "don't buy from the jews" nationalistic crap.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
...and there were a number of Fortran dialects which predated F66.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
That's what we were doing at the airline I worked for. The mainframe had the production data stored in small, fast, and proprietary file formats, but the same data streams were also archived on a Sun box at the same time.
That way, folks who wanted to use the data outside of a mainframe context could run queries against the external data store using industry standard tools, and can also do so without impacting the real production database (which needs to maintain quick response times in order to be effective in the production transaction environment).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Need proof?
Consider C, the weapon of choice for commercial-grade programming. It only has a handfull of control structures to 'hold' the rest of the program together. In the hands of an experienced programmer, C can be used to create programs that are almost as fast (yet readable), as an equivalent program coded in 100% hand written assembly language.
I could do this but I chose not to. I'd rather write lots of different programs in C and learn new stuff along the way rather than pampering the CPU with all the mind-numbing detail and preplanning a large-scale assembly language program would require.
I had a bit of experience with COBOL years and years ago. At the time I had several years of experience with Pascal (after making the radical pardigm shift from line numbered, GOTO-driven BASIC beforehand). Since Pascal and COBOL are both procedural languages, all I had to learn to get up to speed fast was the syntax and 'positioning' requirements of COBOL.
In a matter of days, I was writing somewhat sophisticated, nontrivial COBOL programs that did what they were supposed to do.
Gripe: Boy is COBOL verbose!!! (which fufills the self-documenting requirement of the language).
Why write
add 1 to x giving x
when you can use C and say
x++;
?
...two transaction processing enviroments that run on Unisys 2200-series and Clearpath IX mainframes are currently used heavily at certain airlines.
Programs are small and fast. One enters a tran code, and a program runs which generates a response screen (which could be a data display or a fill-in format that the user has to fill in).
One secret to the high level of efficiency in this type of environment: the use of intelligent, syncronous terminals. The Unisys mainframes use a terminal type normally referred to as "UTS" or "Uniscope", and a UTS terminal processes all basic text editing (character and line insertion/deletion, cursor movement, etc.) locally with no need to communicate with the host. When a user is done editing the screen, a "Transmit" key is pressed which sends some or all of the screen back to the host for processing.
UTS terminals are smart enough to handle things like file justification and alpha/numeric data type enforcement on the terminal through the use of special terminal fields and attributes, offloading even more processing from the host.
That, combined with very fast databases, makes for a very fast interactive application environment...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
not all of the mainframes in current use (or which are currently being marketed) are from IBM, or are even based on IBM's mainframe architecture.
:-)
At least two of the top four airlines in the US are still heavily using Unisys mainframes, for example. Those are based on the Sperry UNIVAC 1100-series boxes of the 1960's and 70's (a 36-bit architecture which is word-addressible, not byte-addressible) and an OS called OS2200 (or OS 2200), and many of them are still running applications software that was originally designed and written during that era (though it is constantly being modified in-house, of course).
As others here have said, mainframes are simply not the old coal-fired boxes that they are sometimes portrayed to be, certainly not on the hardware side of things. What they really are is a centralized server whose design is specialized around very high levels of reliability/recoverability and high levels of data throughput combined with the ability to serve applications to thousands of users with very low levels of system and communications overhead for each user action.
That makes them exceedingly efficient at what they do, not just large and expensive.
Also, while most of them tend to have some "stone age" elements on the applications software side, keep in mind that most of the older software tends to be found at the API level, not in the core of the OSes which support that API.
While application code on those boxes might be very old indeed, or at least based on very old software interfaces, the hardware and software platforms which form the guts of those mainframe boxes have been moving forward over the past few decades just as quickly in many areas as they have been in the desktop and smaller server world.
Part of the reason that such systems still exist is certainly tied to various economic factors like the difficulty of porting applications and such (when one has several million lines of code which is tightly tied to one's business rules, one doesn't rewrite that software arbitrarily).
However, some companies still use mainframes for another reason: they have a few applications which simply cannot fail if the company is to operate effectively. In some cases, even a small outage can cause cascading effects thorughout the company and cost the company millions of dollars. Or more.
My own experience is with major airlines, and they are one of the largest users of such systems in key areas, but financial entities such as NASDAQ have been using similar large systems for years because they need a very high level of reliability and recoverability.
I really think it's a shame that more people are not exposed to these types of systems in college so they can get some sense of what those machines are actually designed for (and what the hardware and software in those boxes is actually capable of).
While Unix, Windows, and Mac systems are ubiquitous these days, they simply do not define all existing computing architectures by themselves, nor can they effectively or efficiently handle all types of computing tasks. Not yet, anyway...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I think the tape robots are actually controlled by a PC. The actual tape drives are connected to the mainframe, probably via a PC based controller that does caching and whatnot.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
First it's on disk, then it ages through lack of use and gets migrated to tape in f*cking HUGE rooms full of f*cking huge silos which are full of f*ckng quick tape drives and large cartridges, none of your measly 200Gb 20MB/s cheap crap.
You access a "stub" file on disk, the tape the corresponding real file is on gets mounted in a drive, the drive seeks to the correct block on the tape, reads the file and puts it on disk. Takes about a minute on average if you have quick robots and fast tape drives.
I can easily believe that 70% of the world's data is on mainframes. A terabyte is nothing, we're talking petabytes and exabytes of storage.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
> 70 percent of the world's data are still housed
> in mainframe computers.
Pathetic. You monkeys get more primitive by the day, not less.
OTOH, it does make hash of the Sun line that "The network is the computer" (or was it the other way around?)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
...if you think about it, all the latest n-tiered apps are going back towards the whole mainframe serving dumb-clients idea.
Ok, so our dumb clients are a tad more sophistocated and capable than those in days of yore (I could never have played splinter cell on for for instance) but with websites and other such apps all of the brunt processing work is taking part on the server whilst the pc/web browser combo is simply displaying the output.
I find it interesting that we're now going back and saying "hey, that's not so bad, lets use a riff on this idea".
I am NaN
It's fairly simple mathematically.
If you have 1 system, 1 set of applications. Life is sweet. This is the mainframe.
If you have 2 systems, there's 2 sets of relationships which have to be managed, life is good.
If you have 4 systems, there's 16 sets of inter-relationships that have to be managed and life is interesting.
If you have 16 systems, there's 256 sets of relationships to manage and life is extremely busy.
With 256 systems, there's 65536 sets of relationships and frankly you're taking the piss.
With 5,000 systems (easily possible to have 5,000 servers in a multinational corporation) and no real thought to the complexity management, well, you've got 25,000,000 sets of relationships to manage, your army of IT staff and shareholders are holding the high ground and taking pot shots at users with high powered hunting rifles.
It's why pure peer to peer doesn't work. You have to start breaking the complexity down into layers of services, somewhere between 4 and 16 systems if you're sane. But you're never going to get mainframe levels of simplicity and therefore support costs and reliability.
We've managed to design our distributed infrastructure so that support and maintenance costs and sysadmin effort are increasing logarithmically rather than linearly or worse but... It still isn't a mainframe.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If you look inside a number of servers these days, it looks a lot like a mainframe. I2O and other split busses that Linux uses well. Indeed I get better performance from a well tuned Linux box with the appropriate hardware. The "mainframe" doesn't stand a chance. Well, I guess you could say the Linux box is a mainframe then in a sense. I can hold more stuff on my desktop than nearly all mainframes of just 10 years ago, all of the mainframes of 20 years ago. This will be even more so true when Seagate comes out with their big mother drives soon (terra byte or so for $200 bucks! Woo Hoo!)
Also, don't let the Mainframers BS you. They tell you it is so stable and NOTHING can hurt it... try filling up a data set. Under all other OS's, it tells you when it runs out of space and nothing bad happens. I filled up a few under MVS and whammo! blew the OS out of the water. Considering how expensive they are, 2 billion isn't that much. Sounds like just a few government buyers.
Doug Balog, an IBM vice president, noted that 70 percent of the world's data are still housed in mainframe computers."
Even more interesting from my perspective is the fraction of the world's money supply in these proven beasts.
Sure there are PC's with a few financial databases made up from some spreadsheet, but I think most of the world's money is entrusted to IBM mainframes that were the first computers to enter banking in a big way.
Probably much of the $33 trillion dollars in total U.S. debt [govt+corporate+personal+mortgage] is kept track of in these mainframes, too.
Considering the age of the technology, it plays a vital part of our economy. It's probably much more important for mainframe customers to have live backups, disaster recovery plans, etc. compared to most computer users.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
your 'stalled program' is likely the result of poor coding at the application level, and improper testing prior to implementation. Yes, even if it causes *terrible* response time, the problem can be isolated to the application, which can be killed off without causing any further corruption or degradation. Neither the subsystem or core OS will be brought to an unstable state by application errors such as this.
test
For something to be plural, it has to be countable in a discrete way. If I tell you I have 3 data, that doesn't tell you anything at all. The natural question that arises is "three *whats* of data? - three bytes? Three measures taken at spots in space (the USGS meaning)? What is it?" And when looked at that way, you see that the plural is actually on the measure, not on the data. You don't have 3 data. You have 3 *bytes* (of data), or 3 numbers (of data) or 3 points (of data).
You can't pluralize 'data' any more than you can pluralize "air" or "mud" or "water".
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Certainly. But I was referring to its use with "to be." Thus, the data are ___.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Other than it reminds me how old I am, I don't understand why we are confusing the introduction of the IBM System/360 with the birth of the mainframe. The first commercial mainframe (Univac I) was shipped in 1951, as I recall, and IBM had already wised up and were building at least 3 of their own at the time. I met my first mainframe computer in 1958 and the first supercomputers were already abuilding. Writing programs in Fortran was the happening thing and what served as a "byte" was 6 bits.
Actually, he is correct in this particular usage.
There's a pretty good zArchitecture summary here describing the RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) aspects of the z900. Be sure to back up and visit the G5/G6 RAS features (linked in the article), because those still apply. Note that the z990 added a couple new RAS features.
This journal article mentions something called Parallel Sysplex, and it's worth highlighting. Very interesting stuff, that.
They do OK over at IBM with zSeries hardware sales, such as this one in February. As you can see, $4.2 billion is at least in the high hundreds of units.
You can also lease them. And share them (through a service bureau).
It's free. IBM has a program for Linux developers who wish to test their application(s) on a genuine mainframe. You get a free z/VM-hosted Linux image for 30 days.
Which gives an idea of how many concurrent VMs mainframes can handle (and at what cost if IBM is giving them away to developers). Note that you have the whole image, root login and all.
What are you talking about?
At the Data Center I recently worked with, we had three StorageTek libraries. Each held seven SDLT drives and had a capacity of over 600 tapes each. Two backup servers, a couple of Quad Xeon boxes, handled the backups of the entire data center of over 1,500 servers. Basically, the backups are run 24 hours a day.
These two servers have no problems filling the drives' bandwidth.
What mainframe?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Small sample:
1. Air New Zealand replaces 150 Compaq servers with a single mainframe running zLinux.
2. Telia Net replaces 70 UNIX servers with a single mainframe running zLinux.
3. Banco Mercantile Venezuela replaces Windows and UNIX servers with zLinux mainframe.
4. SAIC moves application to Linux on the mainframe, for the stock exchanges.
Gartner says IBM had over 100 new mainframe customers in 2002 (according to one report I saw). Haven't seen 2003 data yet.
The one we have is F60 or F70. Well, quite old machine (from 1992 if I remember correctly), but still works :-)
What the hell is wrong with these people who design these GUIs? If the Windows experience makes anything clear, it's that you don't hide vital information, like the full name of a file or its actual type.
If a file is an application, it had better look like an application. If a file is a data file, it had better look like one. The computer obviously knows the distinction when the user does not because it's executing the trojan even though the user thinks it's a data file. And if the computer knows the distinction, then it must present that distinction to the user in no uncertain terms. And in this case, it apparently doesn't.
Frankly, I would have expected the MacOS X team to know better than this.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.